


Better Days

by Seefin



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Grimmauld Place, HP: EWE, M/M, POV Draco Malfoy, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Post-Hogwarts, magic that makes sex easier because i'm lazy and so are they
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 01:10:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13729932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seefin/pseuds/Seefin
Summary: Draco knows Potter’s address. He knows it by heart. His mother took him to Grimmauld Place every Friday afternoon up until the very day his grandmother died, after which they were barred from entering. He remembers the front gate, the stone steps up to the front door, the park opposite where sometimes, after their visits, his mother would take him to play and look at the ducks on the tiny pond.





	Better Days

**Author's Note:**

> this is unbetaed but i say that more as a warning and not because i want u to @ me about mistakes

Draco knows Potter’s address. He knows it by heart. His mother took him to Grimmauld Place every Friday afternoon, up until the very day his grandmother died, after which they were barred from entering. He remembers the front gate, the stone steps up to the front door, the park opposite where sometimes, after their visits, his mother would take him to play and look at the ducks on the tiny pond. Amongst everything that happened Draco almost managed to forget that Potter owned the house his mother grew up in, had almost forgotten that Potter even lived there. But of course Draco knows, of course he remembers. 

He goes there one dusky evening after his parents have retired to their rooms for the night. Draco stands outside it for the first time since he was five years old, on the dirty pavement, and looks up at the dark windows. The front garden has been paved over now, and instead of the lavender bush that used to grow there, a couple of foul-looking bins are overflowing beside the steps. The front gate is gone, along with the wrought iron fence that used to block the garden from the path, as is the delicate handrail that once lead up to the door. Draco remembers putting his hands on the hot iron as he and his mother waited to be let inside, the memory so visceral that he can almost still feel it, still smell the metal, still hear the creak of the door as it opened for them and he was pulled away. 

The snake knocker that used to be on the front door is gone now too, so Draco knocks using his knuckles, and waits the way he used to. He sees a light flicker on through the fanlight, and then Potter is opening the door, blinking as though he’d just been asleep. His hair is ruffled, his eyes tired, and his face is as familiar to Draco as this house, more so maybe, after having seen Potter almost every day for almost half of his life.

Potter swallows before speaking. “Malfoy,” he says, his voice rough. And he might be familiar, but Draco still can’t tell what he’s thinking. 

“Sorry to disturb you,” Draco says. “I- well, I was going to send a letter, but then I thought, since I know where you live--”

“What do you want?” Potter asks, and then glances back over his shoulder into the house, down the dark hallway. 

“Do you have company?” Draco asks. “I can come back.” 

He says that even though he knows he wouldn’t. There was something about this particular evening that made him think of Potter, this place, that gave him the courage to come here. Maybe it had been the evening light.

“I don’t-- have company, no,” Potter says, hesitantly. He seems as though he wants to make fun of the way Draco said that. Draco wouldn’t have minded, if he had. 

“Right,” Draco replies, waiting. 

“Sorry,” Potter says, sounding not very sorry at all. “But what are you actually doing here, Malfoy?” He looks down the hall again, his neck twisting. 

“I came to say thank you,” Draco tells him. Potter’s arm is barring the way into the house, his hand resting on the doorframe beside Draco’s shoulder. He wants to see the rooms one last time before he leaves. He wants Potter to invite him in. “I was going to send a letter, as I said, but I thought it might be better if I came personally.”

“Did Hermione give you my address?” Potter asks. He takes his hand down, finally, but doesn’t open the door any wider. The tiles on the floor look exactly like Draco remembered. He wonders if they would feel the same under his bare feet. 

“No,” Draco says, surprised. “I haven’t seen Granger since I last saw you.” Potter frowns, and Draco gives up. “Listen, may I come in?” he asks. “I don’t really want to talk about this on your doorstep.”

It’s Potter’s turn now to look surprised, but he nods and moves out of the way, letting Draco pass him. “Sorry,” Potter says reluctantly, almost on reflex. “I was just making dinner, if you haven’t eaten.” 

As soon as Potter’s finished talking he gets this odd look on his face, as though he absolutely hadn’t meant to ask Draco to stay as long as it would take to eat an entire meal. “I’d love some dinner,” Draco says, even though he had a steak with mashed potato about forty minutes ago, and currently wouldn’t have room to finish a single biscuit, even if pressed. 

Potter leads Draco down the hallway and then down the stairs into the kitchen at the back of the house, even though Draco could walk the route blindfolded. All the portraits have been taken off the walls in the hall, leaving big faded patches in the dark wallpaper that make Draco irrationally angry. His grandmother had been-- well, awful, really, but the house had never looked like this when she’d been alive. Not just messy, but dirty, and uncared for.

There’s a pot boiling on the hob when they reach the kitchen, and the candles in the chandelier are all lit. Draco used to love this part of the house, where his grandmother never came. The walls are plain white, and the floor is made up of bare, wide flagstones with deep cracks running between them. Currently, a trail of ants is making use of the cracks to transport crumbs from the kitchen table to out of sight underneath the sink, and Draco steps over them delicately as he goes further into the room. Potter has a fire burning in the hearth and he pokes at it for a moment before going to check on the pot. 

“It’s pasta,” he says. “I hope that’s okay.”

“That’s fine,” Draco says. “I’m not fussy.” Potter snorts, opening a cupboard to pull out a jar of tomato sauce. “About food,” Draco amends. 

“Do you want a drink?” Potter asks. “I’ve got some beers.” He gestures over his shoulder to a modern-looking fridge on the other side of the room, the cleanest thing Draco has seen so far. A couple of drawings are up on the front of it, held on by magnets in the shape of colourful letters. 

“Did Teddy do these?” Draco asks, studying one of them. It’s a drawing of this house, he thinks, but instead of brown the child has used red and blue and green, and there’s purple flowers out the front.

“Teddy’s a baby,” Potter says dismissively. “Those have been here for years.”

“Oh,” Draco says. There’s another, a figure with blonde hair, maybe a self portrait. It’s so obvious now that these aren’t recent, from the yellowed paper and the curled edges. “Oh,” Draco says again, then gets them a beer each out of the fridge, turning away from the drawings. 

Draco twists the lid off of Potter’s beer for him and sets it down on the counter beside the hob. “Thanks,” Potter says, taking a swig. He pours the jar of tomato sauce into a frying pan, where it sizzles for a moment before settling. 

“I came to say thank you,” Draco says. “For everything you said at the trial. You probably saved my life.”

“We’re even, I guess,” Potter says, but he doesn’t look up. 

“No,” Draco says, and laughs even though nothing about this is funny. “I don’t think we are.”

“We’re even,” Potter says firmly. Draco studies the side of his face, his cheekbones, the way his mouth is set, and decides that Potter means what he’s saying. 

“Thank you,” Draco tells him. “You would have been well within your rights to-- speak for the prosecution, probably. It means a lot to me that you didn’t.”

Potter swallows hard. “I wouldn’t have done that,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what I think about you. I don’t think you deserved Azkaban.”

“What do you think about me?” Draco asks, his mouth gone dry. He takes a sip of his beer. 

Potter sighs, and turns off the heat. The water in the pot slowly stops boiling. “I don’t, usually,” he says, and then goes to drain the pasta over the sink. Draco doesn’t think that’s true, but he doesn’t argue. 

“It’s ready,” Potter says after a moment, pouring the pasta back into the saucepan and bringing it to the table. Two bowls float from shelf over to join it, setting themselves down on top of two green placemats. “Will you bring the sauce over?” Potter asks, sitting down. “And some forks.”

Draco opens the cutlery drawer on his first try, and then sits down opposite Potter at the table. There’s an aloe vera plant between them in a red and yellow pot, which is cheerful, even though it’s clear nobody’s bothered to water the poor thing in a while. 

Draco only manages a few bites of his pasta before setting his fork down on the table. “I feel a bit sick,” he says, and is sort of surprised to realise that it’s true. His head feels light, as though at any moment it might detach from his body and float up to the rafters. 

Potter shrugs, and keeps eating. He has terrible table manners, Draco realises, after watching him for a while, and he keeps spilling tomato sauce onto the table in front of him. 

“You seriously came here to say thank you?” Potter asks, pushing his bowl away from him once he’s done. 

Draco pauses for a moment. “Well,” he says. “Yes. And I came to say goodbye, I suppose.”

“Goodbye,” Potter echoes. He looks at Draco for the first time in a while, and his eyes are so green. 

“I’m going away for a bit,” Draco tells him. “The day after tomorrow, actually. I’ve been offered a place on an arithmancy course in the university in Berlin. It starts at the end of September but I think it’s important to get settled first.” 

Potter frowns. “That’s,” he says, and then stops. 

“It’s soon,” Draco says, trying to help him out. 

“You don’t want a break first?” Potter asks him. He starts to fiddle with the corner of a placemat, unravelling the fabric under his fingers. 

“It-- will be a break,” Draco explains. 

“You’re not doing your OWLS?” Potter asks. “I thought everyone was going back to Hogwarts after the summer.”

“My marks were good,” Draco says, shrugging. “I don’t think they get that many applicants for arithmancy, to tell you the truth. London’s better for it.”

“You’re seriously going to do arithmancy?” Potter asks dubiously. “As a  _ break _ ?”

“Well what to  _ you  _ intend to do?” Draco snaps. 

Potter tilts his head to the side noncommittally, then stands. The dishes rise from the table when he does, following him over to the sink and sinking down into the water when he turns the tap on. “I dunno,” Potter says. “I haven’t decided. I might not do anything.”

“What,” Draco says, “for your entire life?”

“What makes you think you have a fucking say in it?” Potter replies angrily. “I could-- whatever I did, you wouldn’t be a person who gets to comment on my choices.”

Draco pushes his chair back, swigging the last of his beer. “You’re right, of course,” he says. “I’d better go. Thank you for dinner.”

“You didn’t eat anything,” Potter says, turning the tap off with more force than is probably necessary. “You didn’t even take your jacket off.”

“Can I see the family tree before I leave?” Draco blurts out. 

Potter turns to him. “It’s gone,” he says. “I took it down.”

“Oh,” Draco says weakly, his eyes hot. “What did you do with it?” 

“It’s in the attic somewhere, I think,” Potter replies. He’s staring at Draco as though he’s a bomb that’s about to go off. “Look, I’ll dig it out for you at some point. Send it over to the Manor.”

Draco nods a few times before he manages to find his voice. “Okay,” he says. “I’d very much appreciate that, Potter.”

“You came to say goodbye to me,” Potter says, after a while. 

Draco came to say goodbye to the house, actually. Or at least, he'd thought that’s what he’d been doing. He nods, anyway. 

“I was thinking about sending you a letter too,” Potter confesses. “Hermione said that I should, so that’s why I thought she might have told you where I lived.”

“I already knew where you lived,” Draco said. “I used to come here all the time when I was younger.”

Potter stares at him, and then shakes his head, laughing tightly. “I completely forgot,” he says. 

“This house could have easily gone to me,” Draco says, because he never could say the right thing at the right time. 

Potter laughs. “Honestly Malfoy, I’m really glad it didn’t.” He looks so young when he laughs like that, with his head tipped back. He doesn’t look tired at all. 

“What were you going to say to me, in your letter?” Draco asks him. It’s suddenly the most important thing in the world that he find out.

“I dunno,” Potter says. He hesitates, for a moment. “I guess I thought-- I thought you might not want to come back to Hogwarts for eighth year. I thought you might be thinking that you wouldn’t be welcome. But. I was going to say that you should give it a chance.” He won’t meet Draco’s eye. 

“Oh,” Draco says. “That’s-- nice, actually.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore, I guess,” Potter says. He looks at the floor, the flagstones, the whitewashed walls, the cupboards. He doesn’t even look over when Draco stands to move beside him again, leaning his hip up against the wooden counter. 

“It’s still nice,” Draco tells him. “Do you think people would have given me a chance?”

“I think people want to,” Potter says, strangled, and Draco leans down to kiss him. 

Potter pulls back almost immediately, which makes Draco braces himself instinctively. This is definitely the single worst move he’s ever made, which is really saying something. But Potter doesn’t do anything, he just pauses for a moment. Then he kisses Draco, better than Draco had done it, pulling him closer with his hands on Draco’s neck. 

Draco kisses the seam of Potter’s lips, the wet, open heat of his mouth, and then has to break away to breathe for a second. Potter mouths down the side of his neck, his hands sliding down to Draco’s waist and rucking his t-shirt up. 

“Take your jacket off,” Potter mumbles, and Draco does. He would follow any directive Potter chose to give him, truly. 

“Take your-- this, off,” Draco says, tugging at Potter’s shirt, already moving to undo the button at Potter’s neck. As soon as Draco can, he gets his mouth on Potter’s collarbone, sucking down hard until he hears Potter hiss, Potter’s hand coming up to cup the back of Draco’s neck, keeping him there. 

“What do--” Potter says, interrupting himself as he takes his shirt off. Draco runs his hands onto Potter’s dark shoulders, his chest. This is still the single worst idea he’s ever had, obviously, but the need to touch Potter’s dick is rather outweighing that right now. “What do you want to do?” Potter manages eventually, before pulling Draco’s head up so he can kiss him again, frantic. 

“Um,” Draco says intelligently. “Merlin. I don’t know, anything. I want you to come.”

Potter laughs against Draco’s cheek. “Sure,” he says. “No, yeah, let’s--” He cuts off and turns around, pressing back against Draco. 

Draco’s heart thuds against his ribcage. “Oh,” he says, and splays his hand across Potter’s bare back. “You want to?” he asks. 

“God,” Potter laughs. “Yeah. Please.”

“Oh,” Draco says again, “you don’t have to say please.” Potter’s skin is hot under his hand, soft and smooth. Draco kisses his left shoulder blade. 

“Hurry,” Potter urges, and reaches in front of himself to undo his trousers, pushing them down halfway to his thighs before Draco gets it into himself to help. 

“I’m going to-- use spells,” Draco tells him. He pulls his own trousers down, strokes himself a few times, getting himself wet. It’s never been like this before. Never. 

“Yes,” Potter urges, pushing back against Draco’s hands. “Just-- get in me, Malfoy.” 

“Merlin,” Draco says again. “It’s so weird hearing you call me that,” he says, casting a couple of spells under his breath. The last one makes Potter groan, and slump forward further onto the counter. 

“Fuck,” Potter says. “We can talk about it all you want after you’ve fucked me.”

Draco pushes inside him slowly. Potter is hot around him, wet, not as tight as he would be if they’d opened him up with Draco’s fingers. “Merlin,” Draco manages. “You feel--” 

“I know,” Potter pants. “I know. Get it together, though, please.”

“Don’t say please,” Draco says, pulling out, fucking back in. Potter groans again. It’s a brilliant sound, one of the best Draco has ever heard. 

“Okay,” Potter agrees, breathless, moving onto Draco’s dick. “Okay, okay, okay. Fuck. Okay.”

Draco laughs, his hands slipping on Potter’s hips, fucking him fast, hard. “Okay?” he asks, and Potter laughs too. 

“Fuck you,” he says, sounding happier than Draco has ever heard him. And it’s so good. It’s so good. 

Neither of them last long. Draco hasn’t done this enough to be able to last long, and on top of that-- it’s Potter. Potter, who is moving against him, panting breathlessly, almost silent, his hair wet at the temples, beautiful. Draco bends over him when he’s close and gets his hand on Potter’s dick, working him through it until he comes, messily, and probably all over the floor. Draco follows not very long after. 

Potter is wet when Draco pulls out, the inside of his thighs shiny with conjured lube. “Do you want me to cast a cleaning spell?” Draco asks, still breathing hard. 

Potter shakes his head, and he’s clean, suddenly, pulling his trousers back up. Draco does too, after a moment, and then doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to say, now. He wants to kiss Potter again, he wants to do this again, he’d like Potter inside him. 

“Would you fuck me?” Draco asks, and Potter starts laughing. 

“Okay,” he says, wildly. “Why not?” 

“Not in here,” Draco tells him. “We should go and find a comfortable surface.”   


“Christ,” Potter says, and turns around. “It’s going to be like this with you, isn’t it?” He kisses Draco, firmly, as though he’s making a point. Although what that point might be, Draco doesn’t know. 

Potter is as good as his word, and fucks Draco in his bed, in a room Draco hadn’t ever seen before now. The walls are white in Potter’s bedroom too, but there are paintings on the wall of coastal scenes, and photos on his bedside table, and the sheets smell like fresh cotton. Potter is the only familiar thing to Draco in this room. 

“Will you be back?” Potter asks, once they’re lying together, quiet in the dark. “Ever?”

Draco snorts. “I’ll be back for Christmas, Potter, before you go getting worked up about it.”

“Maybe I’ll see you,” Potter says, kicking Draco in the kneecap under the covers. 

Draco kicks him back, gentler by far than he once would have done. “You should get some lavender in your front garden,” he tells Potter. “I've heard it keeps away unwanted visitors.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Draco knows Potter’s address, so he writes to him, when he’s away in Berlin and it’s snowing. And he writes to him in late spring when the days are getting long again, and in the summer when Draco can’t sleep from the heat. _I miss your house,_ Draco says to him. _And you. Remember to water your plants, my birthday is coming up,_ he writes. _I want you to think well of me._
> 
> _You’ll see it soon,_ Potter replies. _And I miss you. I will, I know. I do._


End file.
